I was very grateful and honored to be chosen as a recipient of the ACM-W Scholarship for Attendance at Research Conferences and thus be able to attend one of the top three conferences in the world of computational linguistics and text mining. I took part in one of the Semantic Evaluation challenges collocated with the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) conference and successfully presented my research on machine learning based systems for biomedical information extraction from text. During the conference and several workshops I had the opportunity to discuss about my work, as well as that of the fellow researchers, which gave me new insights about many different approaches and methodologies that can be explored. Being exposed to state-of-the-art research and communicating with renowned experts is indispensable experience, one that motivated me even more and expanded the possibilities of my future PhD research.
I would again like to express my gratitude for receiving financial support that covered most of my expenses of coming to Atlanta, USA from Germany and allowed me to be immersed in the community of people doing cutting-edge science in the area of my academic interest.